Jack Laurence

The guards outside their door were certainly not actors, and the guns were not loaded with blanks.

The country beyond those walls was no film set.

It was Somalia, in the grip of civil war, controlled in large part by one of the most dangerous militant groups on earth.

Everything that was about to happen, the hole in the wall, the running, the escape, was real.

And it was about to begin.

Here goes Andy Dufresne.

Incredible how ingenious you become.

I mean, I talk to prisoners on a daily basis who do all sorts of weird and wonderful things in their cells over the years when they've just got nothing but time to think about things.

So Nigel had his weak point.

He had two days of patient, careful work behind him, but now they needed something else.

Something no map and no compass, no phone could give them, because they didn't have any of that.

They needed a direction.

They knew they were somewhere in Somalia.

That was the extent of what they knew about the location.

They knew the name of the town, but they didn't know how far they were from Mogadishu.

They didn't know which way the roads ran or where they led.

In a country with no functioning infrastructure to speak of, no landmarks, of course, that they would recognise, and a militant group controlling the territory around them, running in the wrong direction was not just useless, it was potentially fatal.

They could run straight into the arms of another al-Shabaab cell.

They could run deeper into open countryside with no cover and no hope of help.

They could run for hours and end up further from safety than they even started.